Research
Research at the Center
The American Studies Program is a research community as much as a teaching one. Its Center for American Studies has hosted a decade of nationally funded projects on memory, trauma, violence, and migration in American culture.
The Center for American Studies
A documentation and research hub within the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, the Center supports the BA and MA programs, hosts the program's journals and its annual student conference, and works closely with the Romanian–U.S. Fulbright Commission and the Romanian Association for American Studies.
DirectorDr. Dragoș Manea
Research domains
- Theories of American culture and the practice of American Studies
- Comparative Romanian / Euro-American studies
- American identities through the lens of transnationalism and globalization
Library & resources
A lending library of over 4,000 volumes — continuously grown through an annual U.S. Embassy grant — plus access to specialty journals and multiple online databases, in the Center's own reading room (Room 4, Pitar Moș).
Journals
- [Inter]sections ISSN 2068-3472 The annual double-blind peer-reviewed journal of American Studies at the University of Bucharest — the first of its kind in Romania.
- Stamped The American Studies Program's creative-writing magazine.
Funded projects
Three multi-year projects, funded by UEFISCDI, with full research records — summaries, publications, and the conferences they produced.
- Representations of Violence in Contemporary American Popular Culture How American popular culture — film, television, comics, and social media — makes violence hyper-visible, and what that visibility does to public empathy and the possibility of social action. Principal investigator: Mihaela Precup Open the project
- Cross-Cultural Encounters in American Trauma Narratives: A Comparative Approach to Personal and Collective Memories Traumatic memory mapped across post-WWII American narratives — the Holocaust, the Cold War, Vietnam, the AIDS crisis, and 9/11 — read as an interconnected, cross-generational dialogue. Principal investigator: Roxana Oltean Open the project
- Women's Narratives of Transnational Relocation Narratives by and about women in temporary and permanent transnational relocation after the fall of communism — at the crossroads of migration, gender, new-media, and literary studies. Principal investigator: Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru Open the project
Earlier projects
Other UEFISCDI projects hosted by the Center between 2010 and 2024.
- Familiar Perpetrators: On the Intimacy of Evil in Contemporary American Literature and Popular Culture
- Colonial Discourse in Video Games
- The Representation of the Perpetrator and the Ethics of Empathy in American Graphic Narratives
- Transcultural Networks in Narratives about the Holocaust in Eastern Europe
- Witnessing Destruction: The Memory of War and Conflict in American Auto/biographical and Documentary Narratives
- Intergenerational Dynamics of Vulnerability in American Trauma Narratives